Home Fileserver: Handling pool errors

Until today I had never encountered even one read, write or checksum error on my ZFS NAS. Today I saw one checksum error coming from the mirrored SSD root boot pool which I have just installed. Unless you’re using a file system like ZFS (or NetApp / Veritas…$$$), then you’ll almost certainly never even know […]

Home Fileserver: ZFS boot pool recovery

If you should be unlucky enough to be unable to boot your OpenSolaris NAS one day, then these notes taken from a real restoration test might help you get back up and running again quickly. After setting up a supposedly robust mirrored ZFS root boot pool here using two SSD drives, I decided to give […]

Home Fileserver: Mirrored SSD ZFS root boot

When I started using this ZFS NAS for additional tasks, I realised that my boot environment was becoming more important, and was a weak point in this system. Initially I wanted to run a master copy of this website locally on this ZFS server, and that entailed installing WordPress and the OpenSolaris AMP package comprising […]

Home Fileserver: OpenSolaris 2009.06

After running SXCE for the last year, due to a failed hardware upgrade, it was time to install OpenSolaris 2009.06. I was due to leave on a trip the next morning, but foolishly I decided to install a 3.5″ drive into a 5.25″ drive bay with some anti-vibe rubber grommets installed. When re-attaching the IDE […]

Home Fileserver: Active Directory Integration

Matt Harrison wrote to me recently, to notify me about a guide he’d written showing how to integrate a ZFS-based OpenSolaris fileserver with Microsoft Active Directory. His guide covers all the necessary areas like: configuring Kerberos, synchronizing time/dates, enabling the CIFS server, joining the domain, user and group mapping, ZFS datasets, setting ACLs and auto-sharing […]

Home Fileserver: RAIDZ expansion

Recently I decided to expand the storage capacity of my ZFS home fileserver’s ZFS storage pool, which was configured to use a single RAIDZ vdev comprising of three 750 GB drives. I wanted to expand the RAIDZ vdev by adding one extra 750 GB drive. As you may or may not be aware, it is […]

Linux to get ZFS?

An intriguing post appeared yesterday on the blog of Jeff Bonwick, where it simply shows photos of an informal meeting between Jeff and Linus Torvalds — could it be that Linux will get ZFS soon, due to changes in licensing, or could Linus be joining the ZFS team with Sun, or something else?

Home Fileserver: Drive temps

With the summer coming on, the ambient room temperature is increasing, and so here’s a handy script to help you monitor your drive temperatures to help prevent heat-related data loss.

Home Fileserver: Backups from ZFS snapshots

Backups are critical to keeping your data protected, so let’s discover how to use ZFS snapshots to perform full and incremental backups.

Home Fileserver: Trunking

I had two Gigabit ethernet ports sitting on this motherboard and I was only using one. So I decided to take the path less travelled, as you never know where it can lead…